The Pentagon is so starved for bandwidth that it’s paying a
Chinese satellite firm to help it communicate and share data.

U.S. troops
operating on the African continent are now using the recently-launched Apstar-7 satellite to keep in
touch and share information. And the $10
million, one-year deal lease — publicly unveiled late last week during an
ordinarily-sleepy Capitol Hill subcommittee hearing — has put American
politicians and policy-makers in bit of a bind. Over the last several years, the
U.S. government has publicly and loudly expressed its concern that too much
sensitive American data passes through Chinese electronics — and that those
electronics could be sieves for Beijing’s intelligence services. But the
Pentagon says it has no other choice than to use the Chinese satellite. The need
for bandwidth is that great, and no other satellite firm provides the
continent-wide coverage that the military requires.

“That bandwidth was
available only on a Chinese satellite,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense
for Space Policy Doug Loverro told a House Armed Services Committee panel, in
remarks first reported by InsideDefense.com. “We recognize that there
is concerns across the community on the usage of Chinese satellites to support
our warfighter. And yet, we also recognize that our warfighters need support,
and sometimes we must go to the only place that we can get it from.”

The Apstar-7 is owned and operated
by a subsidiary of the state-controlled China Satellite Communication Company,
which counts the son of former Chinese premier Wen Jiabao as its chairman.
But the Pentagon insists that any data passed through the Apstar-7 is protected
from any potential eavesdropping by Beijing. The satellite uplinks and downlinks
are encrypted, and unspecified “additional transmission security” procedures
cover the data in transit, according to Lt. Col. Damien Pickart, a Defense
Department spokesperson.

“We reviewed all the security concerns, all of the business
concerns with such a lease,” Loverro said. “And so from that perspective, I’m
very pleased with what we did. And yet, I think the larger issue is we don’t
have a clear policy laid out on how do we assess whether or not we want to do
this as a department, as opposed to just a response to a need.”

Every new drone
feed and every new soldier with a satellite radio creates more appetite for
bandwidth — an appetite the military can’t hope to fill with military spacecraft
alone. To try to keep up, the Pentagon has leased bandwidth from commercial
carriers for more than a decade. And the next decade should bring even more
commercial deals; in March, the Army announced it was looking for new satellite
firms to help
troops in Afghanistan communicate. According to a 2008 Intelligence
Science Board study (.pdf) — one of the few public reports on the subject —
demand for satellite communications could grow from about 30 gigabits per second
to 80 gigabits a decade from now.

Relying on Chinese
companies could be a problematic solution to the bandwidth crunch, however. U.S.
officials have in recent years publicly accused Chinese telecommunications firms
of being, in effect, subcontractors of Beijing’s spies. Under pressure from the
Obama administration and Congress, the Chinese company Huawei was rebuffed in
its attempts to purchase network infrastructure manufacturer 3Com;
in 2010, Sprint
dropped China’s ZTE from a major U.S. telecommunications infrastructure
contract after similar prodding. Last September, executives from the Huawei and
ZTE were brought before the House intelligence committee and told, in effect, to
prove
that they weren’t passing data back to Beijing. “There’s concern because the
Chinese government can use these companies and use their technology to get
information,” Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, said at the time. The executives pushed
back against the charges, and no definitive links to espionage operations were
uncovered. But the suspicion remains. And it isn’t contained to these two
firms.

“I’m startled,” says Dean Cheng, a research fellow and veteran
China-watcher at the Heritage Foundation. “Is this risky? Well, since the
satellite was openly contracted, they [the Chinese] know who is using which
transponders. And I suspect they’re making a copy of all of it.”

Even if the data passing over the Apstar-7 is encrypted, the
coded traffic could be used to give Chinese cryptanalysts valuable clues about
how the American military obfuscates its information. “This is giving it to them
in a nice, neat little package. I think there is a potential security
concern.”

For his part, Loverro says the Department of Defense will be
reviewing its procedures to ensure that future satellite communications deals
both let troops talk and let them talk in private. The Pentagon will get another
opportunity shortly: the Apstar-7 deal is up on May 14, and can be renewed for
up to three more years.